It has become common practice within the past few years to arrange a communication system to receive voice messages when a called party is unavailable. The received message is recorded and an indicator, such as a lighted lamp, is given to the called party indicating the presence of a message that has been received.
Unisys Corporation, assignee of the present invention, provides a messaging system of the type that receives voice and/or fax messages and stores the messages for later retrieval by subscribers in the form of its Universal Voice Messaging System (UVMS), which is a network application that executes on the Unisys Network Applications Platform (the NAP system). The NAP system is a configuration of hardware and software that provides data and voice processing capabilities through applications, such as UVMS, running on a host computer. The NAP system provides the interface between these applications, called network applications, and a telephone network. Detailed descriptions concerning the construction and operation of messaging systems and of the NAP system and the means for developing network applications, such as UVMS, to run on the NAP system can be found in: U.S. Pat. No. 5,133,004, Jul. 21, 1992, "Digital Computer Platform for Supporting Telephone Network Applications"; U.S. Pat. No. 5,138,710, Aug. 11, 1992, "Apparatus and Method for Providing Recoverability in Mass Storage Data Base Systems Without Audit Trail Mechanisms"; U.S. Pat. No. 5,384,829, Jan. 24, 1995, "Digital Computer Platform for Supporting Telephone Network Applications"; U.S. Pat. No. 5,323,450, Jun. 21, 1994, "Telephone Network Applications Platform for Supporting Facsimile Applications"; U.S. Pat. No. 5,493,606, Feb. 20, 1996, "Multi-Lingual Prompt Management System for a Network Applications Platform"; U.S. Pat. No. 5,633,916, May 27, 1997, "Universal Messaging Service Using Single Voice Grade Telephone Line Within a Client/Server Architecture"; U.S. Pat. application Ser. No. 08/944,924, filed Oct. 6, 1997, "Enhanced Multi-Lingual Prompt Management in a Voice Messaging System With Support for Speech Recognition"; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/964,744, filed Nov. 5, 1997, "Methods and Apparatus for Providing External Access to Executable Call Flows of a Network Application"; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/987,571, filed Dec. 11, 1997, "Multiple Language Electronic Mail Notification of Received Voice and/or Fax Messages"; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/094,126, filed on even date herewith, titled "Universal Messaging System Providing Integrated Voice, Data and Fax Messaging Services to PC/Web-based Clients, Including a Session Manager for Maintaining a Session Between a Messaging Platform and the Web-based Clients"; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/093,593, filed on even date herewith, titled "Universal Messaging System Providing Integrated Voice, Data and Fax Messaging Services to PC/Web-based Clients, Including a Content Manager for Receiving Information from Content Providers and Formatting the Same into Multimedia Containers for Distribution to Web-based Clients"; and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/094,266, filed on even date herewith, titled "Universal Messaging System Providing Integrated Voice, Data and Fax Messaging Services to PC/Web-based Clients, Including a Large Object Server for Efficiently Distributing Voice/Fax Messages to Web-based Clients". Each one of these patents and pending applications is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
A network application, like UVMS, comprises one or more call flows that determine the functionality of the application. A call flow defines how a call is processed from the time it is connected until it is disconnected. It determines how the network application will react to various telephony-related events. In particular, a call flow specifies each function or processing step to be executed during a telephone call, the possible results for each function, the decision path to be followed based on the result, and each voice prompt to be played during the course of the telephone call. Certain call flows also interact with a subscriber to allow the subscriber to set certain user-defined parameters and to enable certain features of the network application.
UVMS is a voice/fax messaging system in which subscribers are each assigned a unique mailbox in which received voice and/or fax messages are stored for later retrieval and playback. A system administrator controls the system features that a subscriber is able to use through a mechanism known as a class of service (COS). COSs are sets of features assigned to different mailboxes. COSs are created and assigned to subscribers by the system administrator and enable the administrator to control the subscribers' use of UVMS features. One group of features that can be enabled in a given COS relate to the manner in which a subscriber can be informed of the receipt of a voice and/or fax message. For example, a message waiting indicator feature can be enabled to provide either a stutter dial tone or a flashing light on the subscriber's telephone to indicate that a voice message has been received and is ready for playback from a subscriber's mailbox.
As data terminals become popular, people have begun to communicate over the data network by sending e-mail messages to one another. These messages arrive at the recipient's host computer and are queued waiting for the recipient to request their presentation in display form on the screen of a terminal connected to the host computer. This arrangement presents problems in that terminals are not always available for use by a recipient. For example, if a data message were to be sent to an electronic address and the addressee were to be away at a location remote from his or her host computer, the received message would not be available to the addressee. Of equal concern, the addressee would not even know that a message has been delivered. The problems compound when users have several different e-mail services. Users must log on to each such service just to find out if messages are waiting.
As a consequence, a user of a plurality of messaging systems typically must individually monitor the status of all of them. The difficulty with existing voicemail service systems is that a user must query this system as well as all the other message service systems to locate and retrieve all messages.
Thus, it would be advantageous if the receiver could receive notification of new messages of different systems, whether he had access to all or to only one of the mail systems normally at his disposal. In other words, it would be advantageous to integrate the messaging systems efficiently, particularly voicemail and e-mail systems because of their relative prevalence, such that notification of all types of mail items is provided at one location or in one form.
Various schemes have been proposed for informing the users in a unified manner of the arrival of messages in any of a plurality of messaging systems. Illustrative examples of such schemes are described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,476,349, 4,612,416, 4,646,346, and 4,837,798.
The prior art typically has a message store for the voice/fax messages and a message store for the e-mail. Typically, both message stores duplicate storage or add dummy headers to track all the messages in all the stores. However, this requires additional storage space.
In a universal messaging system in which different messaging systems (e.g., voice/fax and e-mail) are integrated to provide the "universal" solution, there is a need to be able to handle notification of new messages, regardless of which system (voice/fax or e-mail) receives the message, while minimizing the amount of storage space that is used. The present invention provides a solution to this problem.